One spot continues to
draw me back time and time again. Partly because it's a
beautiful view of Mount Shasta with some natural framing. The other
half of the equation is easy access. The viewing spot is at Cave
Springs in Dunsmuir, somewhere that we've been spending a lot of
time
lately. Being able to run an extension cord to the camera for all night
shots is one more piece of the puzzle. Shooting these long images
is fun and challenging. In many ways it's like shooting film,
you don't know exactly what you're going to get until the photograph is
"developed". The added challenge of the tilt-shift is that everything
has to be setup during the day, because it's too dark to see what's
happening at night. In the above a two second delay between my
exposures created the
surprisingly large gaps in the above image. One of the downsides of
shooting
digital; multiple frames to keep noise down. The upside of shooting
digital is also in the
image; a full moon rose late at night, giving the mountain some
nice definition. Since it was multiple images stacked together, I was
able to leave out the last few that completely washed the mountain out.

From the same spot, but with a very different view at 500mm.
Nikon D700 + Sigma 170-500mm

Two weeks later I was able to return again to capture something similar
but different.
Sony NEX-5N + Arsat 35mm f/2.8 tilt shift.

Using the selective
focus abilities of the tilt shift lens makes the out of focus stars
into nice big circles. This is something that's not easily done
in photoshop, showing the unique ability of a lens that can tilt.. I
like the dreamy feeling of the big soft starts over the
crisp mountain, which is looking much better this month due to fresh
snow.

Finding the star images I also
wandered upon this random shot of a duck with some nice water texture.